1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to query evaluation on distributed semi-structured data.
2. Description of Related Art
Databases that are distributed across networks are difficult and costly to query because a single terminal does not have immediate access to all portions of the database. This problem is especially aggravated when the database is unstructured or semi-structured because few assumptions may be made regarding the structured database. Thus, querying such a distributed database requires undesirably voluminous transfers of data and/or processing queries serially following the relationships of data as they are encountered. The difficulty is further aggravated by increased complexity of the queries themselves. Accordingly, there is a need for efficient techniques to process queries of unstructured or semi-structured distributed databases.